Scrapbooking Vacations with Project Life

I’m committing to Project Life. There, I said it. But it’s not what you think! It’s a scrapbooking technique (come on, you know that complaining about the NHL is about as controversial as I get).

Becky Higgins’ Project Life is a really smart and efficient (yet visually appealing) way to document your life in photos. Many people use it to document the everyday, and make one layout of photos per week, or five per month, etc. With journaling cards, binder pages with differently sized photo inserts, and divider pages, it’s a nice hybrid between a photo album and a scrapbook.

I follow a few scrapbooking/design blogs (namely Paislee Press), so I had heard about Project Life awhile back. At the time, I swept it under the rug. It didn’t apply to me. I didn’t take pictures that regularly, and it wasn’t like I had kids that were a constant source of adorable photo ops. So I looked over the website, thought it was a nice idea, and moved on.

Now, the lovely scrapbook that D gave me for Christmas 2011 is still sitting empty. It’s gorgeous, it has a rich leather cover and is its own box, perfect for archival materials. I’m generally a scrapbook perfectionist, and this one was just too good to mess up. I was anxious. I wanted to break it open and work on it, but I didn’t know where to start. I knew I wanted to focus on trips that we’ve taken together, but I didn’t want to start going through pictures and trying to decide what to print. As someone who has gotten used to working in digital, going back to paper scrapbooking was going to be a transition.

But then, aforementioned Paislee Press designed a PL kit. Cue the angels singing.

So, Project Life entered the picture again, this time as a viable option. I’m cheating, of course. I’m using the PL products not to document everyday living, or one particular year, or one momentous occasion. Instead, I’m using it to document the travels that D and I have taken, and those that we have yet to take. The more I thought about it, the more perfect it was. Project Life has custom binder pages, and some of them are just large envelopes, great for adding brochures, ticket stubs, etc. And because I’m meticulous, I thought that if I laid everything out exactly beforehand, I would know which pictures I wanted to print (and more importantly, in what size) to get the most real estate out of the photo paper.

The kit was made available on Amazon today, so after months of waiting anxiously, I put it in my cart and it will be on its way soon! Now its time to meticulously create my digital versions and get photos sent to the printer. The scrapbook itself won’t even be halfway filled, meaning there is plenty of space for future exciting trips…like our upcoming trip to Montreal!